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Persistence and Polychronicity in Roman Churches Dale Kinney Bryn Mawr College, [email protected]

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Persistence and Polychronicity in Roman Churches Dale Kinney Bryn Mawr College, Dkinney@Brynmawr.Edu Bryn Mawr College Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College History of Art Faculty Research and Scholarship History of Art 2015 Persistence and Polychronicity in Roman Churches Dale Kinney Bryn Mawr College, [email protected] Let us know how access to this document benefits ouy . Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.brynmawr.edu/hart_pubs Part of the History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons Custom Citation Kinney, Dale. 2015. "Persistence and Polychronicity in Roman Churches." In L. Pericolo and J. N. Richardson (eds.), Remembering the Middle Ages in Early Modern Italy, Brepols: 109-130. This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. https://repository.brynmawr.edu/hart_pubs/108 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Remembering the Middle Ages in Early Modern Italy Edited by Lorenzo Pericolo and Jessica N. Richardson F © 2015, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2015/0095/129 ISBN 978-2-503-55558-4 Printed in the EU on acid-free paper © BREPOLS PUBLISHERS THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. Contents List of illustrations ................................................... 5 Introduction J N. R .......................................... 11 Antiquitas and the Medium Aevum: The Ancient / Medieval Divide and Italian Humanism F C ................................................ 19 Vasari in Practice, or How to Build a Tomb and Make it Work C. J C ............................................... 43 Shifting Identities: Jacopo Campora’s De Immortalitate Anime from Manuscript to Print E R ................................................ 67 Leon Battista Alberti: ‘Philology’ of Forms and Time in Sant’Andrea, Mantua A C ............................................... 81 Did Siena Have a Renaissance? J T .................................................... 95 Persistence and Polychronicity in Roman Churches D K .................................................. 109 Pulci’s Morgante and the End of a Medieval World D Q .................................................. 131 Incorporating the Middle Ages: Lazzaro Bastiani, the Bellini, and the “Greek” and “German” Architecture of Medieval Venice L P .............................................. 139 Dante and Petrarch in Giovan Battista Gelli’s Lectures at the Florentine Academy F P ................................................. 169 Medieval Column Crosses in Early Modern Bologna J N. R .......................................... 193 Serving Christ: The Assumption Procession in Sixteenth-Century Rome K N ................................................ 231 Changing Historical Perspectives? Giovan Pietro Bellori and the Middle Ages in Rome E O -M ........................................... 247 CONTENTS 3 Visual Evidence and Periodization in Giulio Mancini’s Observations on Early Christian and Medieval Art in Rome F G .................................................. 257 Epilogue. The Shifting Boundaries of the Middle Ages: From Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860) to Anachronic Renaissance (2010) L P .............................................. 271 Bibliography ........................................................ 323 Plates ............................................................. 365 Index ..............................................................381 4 CONTENTS © BREPOLS PUBLISHERS THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. D ALE K INNEY Persistence and Polychronicity in Roman Churches he persistence of an architectural type from late antiquity in the churches of medieval Rome is a cause of fascination as well as dismay to art historians. Even the most Teloquent proponent of these buildings, Richard Krautheimer, was uncomfortable with the stubborn adherence of twelfth-century basilicas like Santa Maria in Trastevere to the design of fourth-century prototypes like Saint Peter’s (Figs 1‒2). Krautheimer’s expressions of disappointment (“monotonous,” “unexciting,” “conservative and retardataire”) were catalogued by Marvin Trachtenberg as a prelude to his own call to see these buildings as intentionally anti-modern; not retardataire, but reiterations of tradition that deliberately opposed the novel, non-Roman-looking churches being erected elsewhere in Europe (the Romanesque and Gothic buildings that in the modern canon are truly ‘medieval’).1 Trachtenberg went on to argue that the Roman “semiotic valorization” of the early Christian basilica was important for Filippo Brunelleschi, who was directed by these belated avatars to the originals, which became the basis of his own Renaissance recreation of the basilica design.2 Viewed through another lens, Santa Maria in Trastevere is one of many examples of the principle of “substitutability” coined by Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood. According to the substitutional theory, “identity is preserved across long chains of restorations and replacements.”3 Regardless of style or date of construction, the church building is eectively the same as the rst sacred structure on its site, as replacements of auratic progenitors become those progenitors through re-embodiment. In the case of Santa Maria in Trastevere, the extant church is a twelfth-century transept basilica; it stands on the foundations of a fourth- century basilica which in turn is believed to have replaced a “house of Callixtus” named in hagiographic histories of the third-century Pope Callixtus I (217‒222).4 Before these Christian constructions the site was occupied by the veterans’ inn (taberna [e]meritoria) where a well of oil erupted in the time of Emperor Augustus, foretelling the birth of Christ.5 This primary structure is commemorated in the inscription set into the seventeenth-century ceiling over the site of the miracle, just in front of the triumphal arch: “in this rst house of the Mother of 1. Krautheimer 1980, 176 and Trachtenberg 1996. For a more recent view see Kinney 2012. 2. This is counter to the standard history, according to which Brunelleschi drew his ideas from Romanesque and Gothic paradigms in Florence. 3. Nagel and Wood 2010, 51. 4. Krautheimer et al. 1937‒1977, 3:65‒67 and Coccia et al. 2000. 5. Einaudi 1990, 213‒17. PERSISTENCE AND POLYCHRONICITY IN ROMAN CHURCHES 109 Fig. 1. Comparison to scale of Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome, 1139‒1143 (right), Saint Peter’s, c. 340 (center), and the third church of Cluny, 1088‒1130 (left). God, once the taberna meritoria, a fountain of oil bursting forth from the ground portended the birth of Christ” (Fig. 3).6 Exactly as Nagel and Wood describe it, Santa Maria in Trastevere collapses its own history into one continuous presence; time “doubles or crimps […] over upon itself.” 7 This shrine, haec aedes, is simultaneously the twelfth-century basilica covered by the seventeenth-century ceiling containing the inscription, the domus Callisti supposedly consecrated to the Virgin Mary before any other church in Rome, and the pre-Christian taberna meritoria where Mary’s divine motherhood was foretold. Nagel and Wood articulated a fundamental truth about churches and other sacred buildings. For art history, the principle of substitutability has the virtue of normalizing architectural manifestations that are shunned by teleological, style-based histories in which only forward-looking buildings nd a place.8 Santa Maria in Trastevere happens to be closer in form to its own prior instantiation than, for example, the twelfth-century remodeling of Saint-Denis (Fig. 4), but in a substitutional model both churches are interesting for their supra- or extra-morphological sameness to the event that brought them into being. Abbot Suger’s proto-Gothic appendages were connected to the Carolingian basilica that replaced the Merovingian church erected over the tomb of Saint Denis, just as all the instantiations of Santa Maria in Trastevere are linked to the fons olei. As anachronic substitutions, the two twelfth- century buildings are equivalent. The principle of substitutability is metaphysical. As such it is very capacious, applying to all buildings that claim their origin in an auratic prototype or event. The early modern basilica of Saint Peter’s could be substitutionally identical to Constantine’s, as they are both links in a chain originating in the site of Peter’s tomb. In this case, however, the morphological dierence between the original and the present basilicas is not a neutral fact, but a sign of discontinuity, a rupture that Nagel and Wood acknowledge with substitutability’s “competitive model”: performance. Performance is authorial intervention; in this case, the intervention 6. “IN HAC PRIMA DEI MATRIS AEDE TABERNA OLIM MERITORIA OLEI FONS E SOLO ERVMPENS CHRISTI ORTVM PORTENDIT.” 7. Nagel and Wood 2010, 45. 8. Trachtenberg 1996, 169. 110 DALE KINNEY © BREPOLS PUBLISHERS THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. IT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER. Fig. 2. Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome, interior. of Bramante / Sangallo / Michelangelo / Maderno. Performance creates discontinuity by introducing a new point of origin for the artwork in the design
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